Gabbard has spoken about growing up as a mixed-race girl in a multicultural and multireligious household: her father is of Samoan and European ancestry and an active lector at his Catholic church, but also enjoys practicing mantra meditation, including kirtan. Her mother is of European descent and a practicing Hindu. Tulsi chose Hinduism as her religion while she was a teenager.

It's a long-shot, but if she wins, she'd be the first Hindu to be president (and also first woman, first Samoan).

Tulsi Gabbard is a true anti-war progressive, and she knows exactly what she talks about. I think the reason why it's a long shot is that the media will not give her her fair share of the megaphone, because they don't want to hear from anyone opposing US wars.

I didn't know she was also a Hindu. Makes her all the more interesting. I liked her recent interview at Jimmy Dore.

I've followed Gabbard and have followed her since her first congressional win. I like her leadership style, that she isn't a party puppet, and that she addresses certain structural problems in America directly. Putting an end to EndlessWar(TM) being one of them.

I'm conflicted by queer friends who condemn her as a homophobe. Even though she has changed her views on LBGT rights and has a voting record to support that. But they condemn her because of her earlier social beliefs from her 20's.

And I'm conflicted about *that* as people can and do change. I've known more than one degenerate racist come to coo over their biracial grand-babies. And I'm conflicted because plenty just give lip service to justice issues, and the presumption that good candidates arise perfectly formed is problematic.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there something about her current views and record that I'm missing?

I don't know much about her but here are a couple of articles that explain the LGBT controversy. Apparently when she was in her late teens she worked for her father's anti-gay organization. Her father has been involved in several anti-gay marriage organizations which the CNN article discusses.

Apparently, when she first ran for local office and then later for state office, she publicly opposed same-sex marriage, but has since publicly supported it and other gay-rights legislation. There seems to be a question as to whether or not she personally supports GLBT rights or not.

Russia's propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard
Experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

NBC News published a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.

To justify its claim that Tulsi Gabbard is the Kremlin’s candidate, NBC stated: “analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted ‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

What NBC – amazingly – concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: that same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'”

At the same time that New Research’s CEO, Jonathan Morgan, was fabricating Russian troll accounts and using them to create a fraudulent appearance that Putin was trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate, he was exploiting his social media “expertise” to claim that Russians were interfering in the Alabama Senate election. In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled.

Even worse, Morgan’s firm is behind one of the recent Senate reports on Russian social media election interference as well as the creation of “Hamilton 68,” the pseudo-data-driven dashboard constantly used by U.S. media outlets to claim that its enemies are supported by the Kremlin (that tool has so been abused that even some of its designers urged the media to stop exaggerating its meaning). During the Alabama race, Morgan – in a tweet he deleted once his fraud was exposed – cited the #Hamilton68 data that he himself manipulated with his fake Russian accounts to claim that Russia was interfering in the Alabama Senate race

(screenshot)

In response to this scam being revealed, Facebook closed the accounts of five Americans who were responsible for this fraud, including Morgan himself, the “prominent social media researcher” who is the CEO of New Knowledge. He also touts himself as a “State Dept. advisor, computational propaganda researcher for DARPA, Brookings Institution.”

Beyond Morgan’s Facebook suspension, the billionaire funder and LinkedIn founder who provided the money for the New Knowledge project, Reid Hoffman, apologized and claimed he had no knowledge of the fraud. The victorious Democratic Senate candidate who won the Alabama Senate race and who repeatedly cited New Knowledge’s fake Russian accounts during the election to claim he was being attacked by Russian bots, Doug Jones, insisted he had no knowledge of the scheme and has now called for a federal investigation into New Knowledge.

This is the group of “experts” on which NBC News principally relied to spread its inflammatory, sensationalistic, McCarthyite storyline that Gabbard’s candidacy is supported by the Kremlin.

While NBC cited a slew of former FBI and other security state agents to speculate about why the Kremlin would like Gabbard, its claim that “experts” have detected the “stirrings” of such support came from this discredited, disgraced firm, one that just proved it specializes in issuing fictitious accusations against enemies of the Democratic Party that they are linked to Russia. Just marvel at how heavily NBC News relies on the disgraced New Knowledge to smear Gabbard as a favorite of Moscow:

Experts who track inauthentic social media accounts, however, have already found some extolling Gabbard’s positions since she declared.

Within a few days of Gabbard announcing her presidential bid, DisInfo 2018, part of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, found that three of the top 15 URLs shared by the 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at U.S. citizens were about Gabbard.

Analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted “chatter” related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns. The chatter discussed Gabbard’s usefulness.

“A few of our analysts saw some chatter on 8chan saying she was a good ‘divider’ candidate to amplify,” said New Knowledge’s director of research Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge.

What’s particularly unethical about the NBC report is that it tries to bolster the credentials of this group by touting it as “the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election,” while concealing from its audience the fraud that this firm’s CEO just got caught perpetrating on the public on behalf of the Democratic Party.

The only other so-called “expert” cited by NBC in support of its claim that Russian accounts are supporting Gabbard is someone named “Josh Russell,” who NBC identified as “Josh Russel.” Russell, or Russel, is touted by NBC as “a researcher and ‘troll hunter’ known for identifying fake accounts.” In reality, “Russel” is someone CNN last year touted as an “Indiana dad” and “amateur troll hunter” with a full-time job unrelated to Russia (he works as programmer at a college) and whose “hobby” is tracing online Russian accounts.

So beyond the firm that just got caught in a major fraudulent scam fabricating Russian support to help the Democratic Party, that’s NBC’s only other vaunted expert for its claim that the Kremlin is promoting Gabbard: someone CNN just last year called an “amateur” who traces Russian accounts as a “hobby.” And even there, NBC could only cite Russel (sic) as saying that “he recently spotted a few clusters of suspicious accounts that retweeted the same exact text about Gabbard, mostly neutral or slightly positive headlines.”

NBC also purported to rely on its own highly sophisticated analysis by counting the number of times Gabbard was mentioned by RT, Sputnik and Russia Insider, and then noting what it seems to regard as the highly incriminating fact that “Gabbard was mentioned on the three sites about twice as often as two of the best known Democratic possibilities for 2020, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, each with 10 stories.”

But in contrast to Gabbard, who announced her intent to run for President almost a month ago, neither Biden nor Sanders has done so. Perhaps that fact, rather than – as one of the NBC reporters adolescently gushed: “The Kremlin already has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard” – is what explains the greater amount of coverage?

In any event, NBC News, to smear Gabbard as a Kremlin favorite, relied on a group that it heralded as “experts” without telling its audience about the major fraud which this firm just got caught perpetrating in order – on behalf of the Democratic Party – to fabricate claims of Kremlin interference in the Alabama Senate race.

That’s because the playbook used by the axis of the Democratic Party, NBC/MSNBC, neocons and the intelligence community has been, is and will continue to be a very simple one: to smear any adversary of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party – whether on the left or the right – as a stooge or asset of the Kremlin (a key target will undoubtedly be, indeed already is, Bernie Sanders).

To accomplish this McCarthyite goal, this Democratic Party coalition of neocons, intelligence operatives and NBC stars will deceive, smear and even engage in outright journalistic deception, as NBC (once again) just proved with this report.

That's terrible; what a world we live where we can't even trust the mainstream news outlets any more. Propaganda of course has been going on for centuries, but it seems to be getting worse with all the new media outlets.

Indeed! A number of people I follow have been seeing this happening and have been warning about it for about 2 years now (Aaron Maté, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Jill Stein etc.). This is why I opened the Russiagate thread.

That's terrible; what a world we live where we can't even trust the mainstream news outlets any more. Propaganda of course has been going on for centuries, but it seems to be getting worse with all the new media outlets.

This is nothing new. It used to be (before the internet) that people only had easy access to a very limited pool of news sources and (in the usa) they never saw anything contrary to what they were presented because pretty much all there was was main stream media. The small exception to this was the local newspaper which while it always echoed the international newslines of the main stream media it often did provide different views at least for the local, regional, and national politics which focused on the democrat vs the republican views of how to run things. People didn't realize that there really isn't much difference between the two because the differences between them was the sum total of what they saw and there was nothing to point out how really similar they really are. Mostly people still rely on the main stream media (it is easy) and still don't see this.

Now there is internet and divergent views are just as easy to get as main stream views....so....there is a lot of thrashing as views clash violently. Most people are not willing or even capable of discerning what is happening in the world....presenting any view (whether it be the most rational or the most irrational) is just as easy so there is no easy way for people to conclude what is right and what is wrong.....it used to be so easy for them because ignorance is bliss.....there was no great presence of divergent views and this made life easy......

I can't see any way that this will get any better......the masses have pretty much always been manipulated (same as it ever way) and they are still being manipulated only now it is easy to get really radically divergent views so the intellelctually lazy just go into rejection mode and stances get hardened.
chownah

NYT writer has very strong anti-Gabbard sentiment but doesn't even know what the insults towards Gabbard she parrots actually mean and is even not really that clear about what the facts are about Tulsie Gabbard, but she is pretty positive she's the mother lode of bad ideas, but maybe she's wrong about it, although she doesn't think she's wrong.

Could journalistic bias be made more obvious?

By the way "mother lode of bad ideas" was an expression famously used by Sam Harris in a bigoted characterization of Islam

NYT writer has very strong anti-Gabbard sentiment but doesn't even know what the insults towards Gabbard she parrots actually mean and is even not really that clear about what the facts are about Tulsie Gabbard, but she is pretty positive she's the mother lode of bad ideas, but maybe she's wrong about it, although she doesn't think she's wrong.

Could journalistic bias be made more obvious?

By the way "mother lode of bad ideas" was an expression famously used by Sam Harris in a bigoted characterization of Islam

There was a Town Hall today on CNN featuring Gabbard (and Delaney and Pete Buttigieg). She did good, in my opinion. She is anti-interventionist, anti-war. When pressed about her anti-interventionist views, she held her ground and defended her position well.

In 2012, Dorsey moved to the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco with sweeping views of the Golden Gate, Marin Headlands and Pacific Ocean.[63] He walks five miles to work each morning and calls it a "very clearing time".[64] He is a fan of Kendrick Lamar's music[62] and of French radio station FIP.[65] In late 2017, Dorsey completed ten days of meditation known as Vipassanā taught by followers of S. N. Goenka.[66] In November 2018, Dorsey went on a birthday trip to Myanmar, where social media may have helped fuel a genocide of Muslims.[67] Dorsey said he was "aware of the human rights atrocities" in Myanmar.[68]. Dorsey has also has contributed financially to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.[69]